Rosemary Goring: Endless queues. Endless delays. Are holidays worth it?

Those with children and dogs in the back seats deserve a medal for their resilience. And a complimentary Portaloo.

From the air, each car looked like an ant in a colony on the march – not that they were moving as fast.

Somewhere in the midst of the misery was one of our friends, heading with his wife for Normandy. We couldn’t see him, obviously, but we sent our thoughts his way. They doubtless reached him long before he caught sight of the port.

By now, the worst of the delays are over. Just wait till Friday, though. It is predicted that on every weekend of the English school holidays the same scenes will be repeated.

If I were booked onto a crossing to Calais, I’d be rethinking. The stress and anxiety of being trapped for hour upon hour in a car, in the heat, feeling utterly helpless is a definition of hell rather than holiday.

In the past, newspapers dreaded the end of the parliamentary term, when they were faced with the so-called ‘silly season’.

Without political shenanigans to occupy them, filling column inches became more of a challenge. Not so now.

For weeks already, and stretching who knows how long into the future, airport mayhem, grid-locked roads, rail strikes and ferry failures are managing to knock even our most barking leaders off the front page.

In bygone centuries, travel was for the wealthy, who were rich in time as well as cash. Whether their expeditions were to Europe or the Himalayas or up the Amazon, there was the thrill of the unpredictable about every leg of the journey.

As they hung over the rails of the boat, with the white cliffs of Dover receding in the distance, they could never be entirely confident when or if they would set foot on home soil again.

In 2022, the same pertains.

Going on holiday has become a lottery, though with sky-high odds of hitting problems. Bad enough during the pandemic, when flight corridors were cancelled at drastically short notice, and panicked vacationers rushed to airports as if for the last boats from Dunkirk back in 1940.

All the benefits of a week’s break were lost in the frantic search for a return flight before quarantine restrictions kicked in; those who did not manage to beat the clock faced days of unpaid leave, and the opprobrium that went with it.

Time was when the scent of sun-cream was like Proust’s madeleine: it immediately transported you to one of the Costas. Now, it’s as likely to be a reminder of the time you were stuck in an airport overnight, as the departure boards filled up with cancellations, and you wondered if it might be simpler to catch an ocean liner from New York, or a trans-European train.

The disruption to people’s plans is cruel. Summer holidays, when school’s out, are a high point on the calendar, right up there with Christmas, though even more expensive. They are meant to be a time to unwind, regroup, and rediscover the joy of filling the day with whatever activity floats your boat.

Napoleon put less thought into his military campaigns than some families when deciding where they’re going and what they’ll do once they arrive.

After all, preparation is part of the fun: choosing a campsite or hotel, pre-booking hire cars or tickets for attractions, followed by the long, never-ending countdown to the big getaway.

Now, however, thanks to a travel industry blighted by Brexit and the pandemic – and myriad other problems – there is no longer any assurance that, when day zero arrives, there will be lift-off.

It’s not just foreign holidays that come with snags. In the UK it’s possible to be stymied, without a room for the night. Friends heading for the Outer Hebrides last week found themselves in search of accommodation when their ferry was cancelled because of a bomb scare.

Finding a last-minute bed in Skye, in July, isn’t easy. Fortunately, the beauty of their destination when finally they reached it made all disruption fade from mind.

Not so for one of my younger relatives who arrived at an Airbnb, after a long day’s drive, in a party of four adults and nine children.

The place was filthy, but the owner, when contacted, refused to do anything about it. The only option was to start driving, and search for a hotel en route. Luckily, they then discovered an idyllic seaside house which far outshone their original booking.

Needless to say, the tension of those few hours, when they felt like the wandering Von Trapp Family, has entered family lore.

Going on holiday, it seems, is not for the faint-hearted, even within these shores. Nothing is quite as tricky, though, as preparing to go abroad. Keeping abreast of Covid regulations in different countries, downloading apps required by various immigration authorities, or updating NHS vaccination records, all take their toll.

It’s no wonder some of us face the prospect of getting away with, if not trepidation, then a mounting sense of apprehension. Things have reached a pitch where you begin to wonder if the hassle is really worth it.

Holiday is meant to be a time when you forget your worries; when the most demanding moment of any day is deciding where to go for dinner.

Perhaps after their marathon slog to reach where they’re going, despite overbooked flights or passport delays, most people quickly put it behind them. Problem is, there’s the return journey, when the same obstacles have to be surmounted.

After the catalogue of holiday woes this summer, a hotel or cottage within a few hours’ drive of home has never seemed more appealing.

Not being much of an adventurer, my geographical elastic stretches, within the UK, only so far as a journey I can retrace the same day, should the place turn out to be uninhabitable (as has happened).

Yet, while I’ve been writing, I’ve heard that my nine-year-old granddaughter, at home with her mum, has just announced, “I need a change of scene.”

And therein lies the root of the problem.